He kissed her knuckles and said, “I see into the hearts of men, my queen. Do not doubt what I know of Caesar’s vainglory.”
“I doubt not thy foresight, Lord. I only question how a god may know the hearts of mortals. Many are the times that thou hast confessed thy want of mortal sentiment; that thou yearns to know what secrets enliven the blood and enkindles the heart to beat for another.” She moved her fingers down the granite ridges of his belly, allowing them to trail along his immortal flesh like feathers. Her mouth quirked with feline pride to see that his flesh could not remain unmoved by her touch. “Thou speaketh of the vainglory of man, yet mighty Osiris comes to me with the desires of a man.” She allowed her nails to trail softly over his thighs, but she knew better than to trespass upon that which was forbidden to her; even so, he was visibly aroused by her nearness. She smiled to see the chaos her touch had wrought. “Thou art a god with a man’s pride of flesh.”
The watcher stilled her hand, his fingers like manacles around her delicate wrists, unwilling to acknowledge the dread that she awakened along with his lust. “If thou maketh Rome thy bedmate, understand that it lies there not as thy lover but as a snake that waits to strike as soon as thine eyes are shut.”
With a persistent tug, she gained the release of her hands and reached one up as far as she could, which was hardly higher than his sternum. The gesture was invitation enough for him to lower himself and place his cheek in her waiting palm.
Tempted though he was, he remained as motionless as the limestone gods that guarded the tombs and temples. “I would rather instruct thee to protect thyself. To be as the Sphinx—to have the wisdom of a god and the strength of a lion. That is thy destiny.”
“So it shall be.” Her smile tightened. “Watch me, Lord of Love; that is all thou art good for.”
He stepped back. After a sullen pause, he unfurled his wings and leapt into the night. He could no longer watch her with Caesar, better to brood for a thousand years. Perhaps he might search for his Fallen brother, still mourning the loss of their sister.
It took years of wandering the earth before he finally found the creature that had once been his angelic brother. How grotesque his form appeared now that Heaven’s light no longer shone upon him. Hellish fangs and a face distorted with animal rage was all that was left of the mighty watcher. At his mud-stained feet lay a young woman, flesh cold and waxen. No breath stirred her open chest. No life lit her open eyes.
The gaze of the creature, however, fixed upon Death, the violet tinged with dolor. The eyes—that unearthly violet—were all that remained of his once beautiful brother. “Hast thou come to gloat, watcher?” He spoke not in the language of the Seraphim but in the coarse tongue of the mortals he’d been banished to live amongst.
“I come in the name of love, Brother.”
“Love?” The fallen gave a sharp-toothed snarl and turned away, his black hair falling over his face like a pall. “Leave me. Famine dwells within my heart—I know nothing of love.” The watcher spoke his brother’s name, but the creature lashed out at him with lethal claws. “Do not call me that! I am he no longer!”
“Brother, help me.”
The creature that had once been his brother lifted his untamed head and glared through stygian ropes of matted hair. He was listening.
“I am in love with a mortal.” Well, a goddess alloyed with mortal flesh.
The Fallen laughed with bitter woe. “Fool. It was never our lot to love them. I warned thee against straying too near the flock, now it is thee that wears that stupid ovine look.” A preternatural fire flared behind the violet eyes. “Canst thou feel the dark abyss encroaching, watcher?”
Indeed, he could, every time his gaze turned to rest upon her. “She possesses me, I know not how to turn away.”
The Fallen gave a grunt and shook his head. “Thou art a greater fool than I ever was.” He stood and faced his brother. “Yet look at me now. I must dwell in the darkness, ever the eternal unclean, and there thou stands in the light of God. Thou hast risked too much for love.” A soft growl fulminated from his breast. “Return to thy throne in the north and steel thy heart against love, watcher. Look upon her no longer, for nothing good comes of loving a mortal, lest thou wouldst share a mortal doom.” The Fallen cloaked himself in his soiled and bloodied wolf pelt and backed away. “Search no more for thy brother; his wings are shorn and he is nothing but a pestilence upon this earth.” The creature then turned and loped into the darkness, stepping carelessly over the lorn remains of his bloodless victim.
Death watched him go and when he could sense the beast no more, he took to the sky. Despite his brother’s premonitory warning, he betook himself directly to Alexandria. He could not bear to stay away from her a moment more. Cleopatra would be nigh twice the age she’d been when he’d left her.
He was aghast to find the changes that had been wrought. His queen was so much changed, albeit not for the better.
“I hate thee!” She turned away when he first appeared at her window. The lines about her beautiful mouth had turned cruel “Thou said thou loved me, God of Lies.”
“I was ever thine and I love thee still.” It chilled his blood to know how fiercely he loved her despite how she’d fallen.
“No, Antony loves his queen! What knowest thou of love?” She clutched her hands and held them fearfully to her heart, rubbing them fitfully together as though they would never be clean; hands stained by wayward ambition. Indelible stains of blood and death—the blood and death of her brother and sister.
“Bah!” The face of Death contorted much the same as the Fallen’s had. “Antony is but a dog that whines and growls at the feet of Octavian, yet thou wouldst fain befoul thyself with such a lowly cur.” Thrice she had borne him children, but it was the names of the twins, Helios and Selene, that rankled most; it was as though she’d chosen those very names just to spite him. “He has begotten the sun and moon from thy wasted womb.” The sun and moon he had failed to give her—had dared not give her. The watcher gnashed his teeth in anguish, his heart breaking anew. “Thou hast lost thy compass, woman.”
“Because my North star deserted me!”
“Wherefore didst thou not summon me to guide thee? I’d have come had thou called.”
“I did! The very heavens shook with my cries! But thou heard me not. Even for thee, my lord, I could not wait forever!” The kohl ran wet and dark from each of her lower lids like the Eye of Horus.
“Little queen,” said he in warning accents, “thou knowest nothing of forever.”
“Then begrudge me not my love for Antony, for he doth act upon that which thine eyes hath only ever hinted at. And he hast never forsaken me.”
“He is no better than Caesar!” At least Caesar had had something of wisdom, not a colt’s lust to run without rein. “He wants thee for thy navy. He wants control of Egypt through its mistress. Thou hast nurtured thy lands and prospered greatly. Thou art pharaoh of the richest realm in all the world, my queen. Thou might have ruled the world, yet thou hast endorsed the wrong Roman commander. Rome holds no love for thee and what little love she has for Antony is even now being greatly diluted by the cunning tongue of Octavian; and thou hast furnished the kindling for his fiery vilification thyself.” He had once been so proud of her, and his part in her ascension, but his foresight had been clouded by lust and love for her. And perhaps his lust and hubris had corrupted the very love he’d sought to empower. “Thou hast poisoned thy brother and inveigled thy dog, Antony, to murder thy sister. What hast thou become, my love?”
She threw her arms out wildly, her beautiful voice ricochetting off the walls like broken glass. “I am what thou hast made me!”
“Keep thy voice down!” said he, glancing furtively at Heaven as he retreated from her. He had only meant to prevent her doom, yet all he’d done was hurry it along. “Thou hast made an enemy of Rome; and I have made an enemy of God.” He melted swiftly into the shadows, the sound of his beating wings and her plaintive sobs and m
alisons echoed off the walls.
He was out of his depth here—or perhaps already fallen too deep. His brother was right, he had no business meddling in the lives of mortals, nor, indeed, in the business of queens. In the blink of Heaven’s eye, he had failed to forfend the ruination of his only love. It was he that had ultimately plunged Egypt into the nadir of its existence; it was he that brought death swiftly to the last queen of Egypt.
And had he not taken that one last irrevocable look over his shoulder, he might have escaped that yawning abyss; he might have saved himself that final fall. But he did look, and he had acted. And he had fallen.
Markus was startled abruptly from his melancholic anamnesis as Emma violently thrust his wrist away from her mouth. His nose fluttered as it filled with the sweet, earthy perfume of English rose. And yet the sharp tang of fear alloyed her irresistible scent. Her bloodied lips were slack with horror as she withdrew from him, floundering.
“Now you know,” he said.
“Ay, that you are a snake! A murderer!” Emma dragged her wrist over her quaking lips. Lips that still glistened with his dark ichor.
“You knew what I was long before you came to my bed.” He snapped his teeth together, vexed at this unexpected reaction to his gift. “What exactly did the blood memories reveal?”
“I saw you…I saw you kill Cleopatra!” With that, Emma lifted her skirts and flew from the library.
Chapter Fifty
The Invisible Worm
Without candlelight to guide her, Emma stumbled from the library, blinded by shadows and bitter tears. She knew not where she was bound, only that she was in desperate haste to escape. The weight of all the darkness in the world bore down on her, blighted her, and rushed in her blood like wormwood. A terrible and overwhelming sense of loss girded her heart like a cilice. A loss of innocence, and in its place was fear. Emma’s naïveté had rendered her a purblind fool—to think that she had freely given herself to such a creature, offered her very heart to him!
The sound of her steps clattered hollowly over the chessboard flags of the grand foyer. She swiped at her tear-stained cheeks, hoping to banish the images she’d seen through the gossamer veils of time and blood; but the memories—what she’d mistaken in London for strange dreams—rushed with renewed and immutable clarity into her brain to torment her anew. Memories all along, not dreams! Only this time they’d been vivid and clear and achingly real. How could that be?
Emma had watched and keened from some vague empyrean mist, unheard and unseen, a disembodied watcher—an angel of death that had swooped down from above and fallen upon the young queen with bloody tears and preternatural fury. Cleopatra had lain limp and waxen in his arms while he’d feasted at her breast, weeping and gorging himself on the hot well rushing from her stuttering heart. When that heart had knelled its last, he’d lifted his head to roar at the heavens like a savage wolf, his eyes imbrued with black agony and his mouth a lurid and murderous crimson. She’d watched the silvery plumage fall rapidly from his wings till they were naught but blackened bones, deformed and tipped with sharp, demonic horns.
Cleopatra’s head had lolled aslant, lifeless as a porcelain doll (like Milli had looked in his arms when last she’d seen her sister), the dark tresses falling away from the viperous wounds over her heart. Bite marks so deep and stark a red they were nigh black against the pale, cold flesh. No matter how fast Emma ran she could not escape that scene.
Ahead, there was a chthonic and feeble light that disturbed the shadows in the atrium. She had only a few more steps separating her from those imposing doors beyond which lay her escape. But the peripheral darkness, which she at first mistook for shadows stirred atremble as she swept past a sconce, suddenly materialized into the dread form of the angel of death.
Markus moved to thwart her escape like the fierce titan he was. “Where are you going?”
“Get out of my way!”
“Emma—”
“Kill me and be done with it, or get out of my way.” She made to move past him, but she might well have had better success walking through the very walls of the castle, such was the impossibility of getting past an indissoluble wall of preternatural muscle like the one now barring her escape.
“You speak of death as though it were no more than an insect bite,” he said. “I assure you, it is quite final.”
“I welcome it then, so long as it offers me escape from you!”
“You will not die!” He had moved so fast that Emma did not see his hands till they were locked around her arms. “I forbid it.”
“Death has been the constant stalking shadow in every corner of Winterthurse,” she said. “I am grown weary of dreading the hour it shall strike me down.”
“And I grow weary of your morose tongue.” He snapped his teeth with the force of a guillotine. “Perhaps you might consider suspending your wrath till morning.”
“I cannot bear another moment here!” She would rather face the dangers without than suffer the threat he posed within. “Stand aside, vampyre!”
“Cease your hysterics, woman.” His voice lowered to a hard and brazen timber. “There is more to fear from the night than malaria; I shall lay you by the heels before I let you leave here alone.”
Her countenance fell as she retreated from the doors he blocked. Her chest deflated and she withdrew from his grasp. He was right of course, it was madness to run about the moors in the small hours. Madder still to stay. But she possessed not the hardihood to pit herself against him tonight.
“What did you see in the blood memory?” he asked.
She stared at the checkered marble beneath her boots, hating the way his voice gentled. Only four and twenty hours ago his dark and rapturous whispers had been igniting her blood and now his soft accents appalled her. It was appalling that she was still affected by him.
He lifted her chin with the crook of his finger. “What did you see?”
Did her senses play her false or was there something of grief in the squally shadows of his gaze? No! He was vicious and deadly. Whatever she thought she’d seen did not signify, she must never forget that she was nothing to him but a bag of vittles.
With steel in her bones and a little iron in her voice, she said, “I saw you plunge your fangs into her breast; you drank her off till her heart emptied. You killed her.” He had been the serpent that’d killed the great queen.
If she’d believed him capable of such an emotion, she’d have read some vulnerability in his eyes. “Ay, I killed her,” he said, “but not as you imagine.”
“Lie to me no more, I saw for myself what you did.”
His brow beetled. “You may be sure, my prickly little rose, that I have never lied to you.”
“Why should I believe a killer? You loved her and you killed her—what hope is there for me?”
He snarled and stalked away to pace the floor. “You can ask me that—” with a black look shot from the tail of his eye “—after all that has passed between us?”
“All? What has passed between us, save blood and games?” She shook her head in dismay. “And what lies between us now, hmm?” Certainly not love. “What do you want from me, God of Lies?” Certainly not her heart. No, wait, that wasn’t true. He would have it—leastwise only insomuch as it was the vessel in which his vittles were kept warm and fresh.
Without warning, Markus kissed her. The force of it struck her dumb. It was a punitive kiss. Her lips parted instinctually, and, though she hated herself for it, she began to respond. But he abruptly disconnected their mouths and thrust her away from him as though she had been the instigator of the kiss and not he.
“Yes,” she said, “let me go. Let me leave.”
“No.” The word hit her like a gust of polar wind. “There will be no more talk of leaving.” He settled a frigid glare upon her. “We are joined in blood, you and I.”
Emma made no answer except to leave him in the atrium. She looked back only once before she ascended the stairs, and that merely to assur
e herself he’d made no move to follow.
He did not. Markus stood like one of the silent and watchful suits of armor guarding the entryway. Only his black gaze trailed her up the staircase, promising all manner of diablerie.
A raven awoke her some hours later, convoking its conspirators with murderous cackles outside her window. The drapes were set aglow with blessed sunlight. Instead of berating the bird under her breath as she was inclined to do, she flung the bedsheet from her limbs and rushed through her toilette. Once she was dressed she went in search of Skinner.
“Tell your master,” said she to the cadaverous housekeeper, “that I require fresh air and solitude, I do not wish to be disturbed.”
The wight gave a lifeless nod of her head. “Very good, miss.”
The moment she was out of doors, Emma filled her lungs with the salt air that blew in from the north and turned her face to the overcast sky.
The first order of business was to find Ana. Emma had decided, before she’d fallen asleep, that there was nothing for it but to confess to Ana that she’d done the very thing she’d been warned against—taken blood from Markus.
And what of this impossible notion of killing him. Could she do it? Even if it meant freeing herself and Milli?
She directed her feet towards the Whitby Inn in search of Ana. She entertained little hope of finding the watcher, but what else could she do?
When she inquired after the three sisters, however, the publican appeared bemused. He distinctly recalled seeing Emma there the night before, but had no recollection of seeing the De Grigori sisters. Even the man that had served the ale peered queerly at her when she’d questioned him. Emma left the inn, her insides much disturbed. She betook herself to the ruined abbey and the lichen-mantled tombstones where, not so long ago—though it seemed an eternity now—she’d been kissed for the first time in her life. Kissed by a vampyre.
Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1) Page 35
